Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The IC417 team came to visit in June 2015. The core team educators attended, plus 8 students.

Quotes

[student:] I got to deal with the frustrations of being wrong and trying to figure things out, but I also saw the creative solutions people come up with to solve these problems. I also learned how important it is to code and that fluency in at least one relevant computer language is very important.

[student:] Real astronomy is hard. It’s a little bit of guessing, a lot of research and a whole lot of teamwork. [...] I knew that coming to Pasadena would mean that I would have amazing opportunities that I probably won’t get ever again, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for the amount of life changing science I would get handed.

[student:] I saw that you have to be patient with the sometimes tedious work you have to carry out and when things go wrong, but you also have to be creative to solve your problems and come up with ways to be efficient.

Several of my students have started rethinking their educational paths/choices (thinking more towards something relating to their experiences from this summer.)

[student:] I think real astronomy is going through all the research you may have had in the archives or new data you got, and taking it and learning from it. Still with the scientific research I am surprised how much the scientist really trusts us with it, and how she lets us work hands on with true scientific research.